With less than two weeks to go until we launch The Big Ideas Summit in Chicago, we thought we’d have a quick catch up with some of our keynote speakers to discover what makes them tick, where they see the procurement function heading in the near future and how they would reflect on their successful careers.

But today, we want to know what makes him excited about his work, what he wishes he’d known at 20 years old, and the key skills he’s looking for in a killer team.

How do you stay relevant in a world of fast-paced innovation?

Firstly, client interaction. This gives you exposure to a huge variety of approaches by industry, country and company to innovation. You have to remain selective.

Secondly, you cannot read everything. Instead, take the time to focus on the few key areas you want to learn about.

Thirdly, make time to network and engage through all types of media and professional and industry associations to get the information and bounce ideas to ensure you have learnt and can develop your points of view.

Finally, take the time to think !

What makes you excited to go to work on a Monday morning?

Desire to win.

Clients, my team and the engagements.

Excitement of driving an agenda through IBM that can truly change the world through data, the next natural resource.

What skills and talents contribute to an all-round, great team?

An enquiring, questioning mind with the ability to apply innovative, design thinking.

Passion and drive for the business, profession and self.

What 3 attributes make a great leader?

Confidence to lead and use multiple styles.

Being a good listener and a coach.

Communicator with the strength to give “Straight Talk”

What do you know now that you wish you’d known when you were 20?

Time goes very quickly. Have a plan and follow your dreams. Experience as much as you can.

All those successful Internet Stocks !

The benefit of exercise and healthy balance.

Want to hear more from Graham? On 28th September, Procurious is bringing The Big Ideas Summit to Chicago. Register now (It’s FREE!) as a digital delegate to gain access to all of the day’s action and LIVE video from our speakers and attendees.

Transformation has become the new norm as organisations respond to an onslaught of shocks. But is there a best-practice way to go about transforming a procurement function? We interviewed Procurious Partner, IBM Global Procurement, to discover why they’ve been recognised on the global stage for their approach to the challenge.

If you were to stop any procurement professional on the street and ask what their function is currently up to, you’re unlikely to hear the reply, “Oh, you know – business as usual”. Instead, you can expect to hear a description of some sort of transformation. Whether it’s enterprise-wide or procurement-led, everybody’s doing it. In fact, you could argue that the process of transformation itself has become business as usual, especially if you’ve ever worked in a company where one transformation follows another, ad nauseum.

Where once your organisation may have needed to reinvent itself every few decades, today, an onslaught of shocks – technological, cultural, economic, and regulatory – is forcing companies to transform every few years. Five to ten years ago, your CEO might have become a business icon through a single transformation. The minimum requirement now is being able to execute multiple transformations, while success today is measured in your ability to foster a culture of continuous reinvention.

Showing how it’s done

IBM Global Procurement recognised the need to transform as market dynamics put increased pressure on its customers, which consist of internal IBM business units and external clients. Graham Wright, Vice President, Global Procurement and IBM Procurement Services, described some of these pressures. “We realised that our internal and external clients needed less complexity, more transparency, consistent processes executed with speed, and new solutions. The challenge was to find new ways to stay relevant and be successful – that’s why we launched a radical transformation not only to address the needs of the business but to keep pace with smaller, more agile competition and remain an industry leader”.

The team went about this by ramping up activity across three key areas:

The team unlocked the value of supplier innovation by implementing a state-of-the-art Supplier Enabled Innovation (SEI) program and using new, engaging tools, including cognition. The SEI initiative included 3rd-party ‘Voice of the Supplier’ surveys, supplier incentives including annual awards, and clear performance metrics.

2. Engagement: Delivering simple, engaging user experiences.

After identifying key client pain points around complexity, slow execution and delayed problem resolution, IBM Global Procurement followed a mantra of speed and simplicity to improve visibility, enhance workflows and reduce cycle times. Innovative engagement solutions, such as an “Ask Procurement” chat function for clients, have contributed to an impressive improvement in client satisfaction. The chat application is highly intuitive – it suggests self-service solutions for users, and provides direct access to live agents who can answer questions simply and quickly.

No mention of IBM Global Procurement would be complete without a reference to its not-so-secret weapon – the Watson Cognitive Platform. Through catalog data enrichment and cognitive procurement solutions which provide users with refined real-time data for risk mitigation, market and supplier insights, pricing information and recommendations, the team realised significant efficiencies including hand-free POs and greatly improved process compliance.

As an extremely positive side-effect of this transformational effort, Wright reports that the team’s efforts are being recognised within the wider organisation. “The transformation has helped change the perception of procurement evolving from a cost centre to a value centre.”

While internal recognition of the procurement team’s value is gratifying, the Global Procurement Team was even more delighted to see their efforts celebrated at Procurement Leader’s World Procurement Awards, where the team won the award for “Transforming External Partnerships (Pioneering Business Impact)”. The team’s submission went through a rigorous 3-stage judging process including online judging, peer review and a face-to-face regional debate.

And that’s not all – amongst 350 submissions across 15 categories, IBM Procurement was short-listed for each of the 6 entries it entered a submission for, and picked up 2 major awards – the Transformation award, and another for Risk Mitigation.

Procurious is working with our Knowledge Partner, IBM, over the next 12 months to promote cognitive procurement to our global community. To learn more about IBM Global Procurement, click here.

A New Era Of Computing

We’ve entered into a new era of computing: “the cognitive computing era”, which follows the eras of programmable and tabulating systems and represents a massive jump forward that will transform how enterprises operate.

This new era is defined as such because there is a fundamental difference in how these systems are built and how they interact with humans. Traditional programmable systems are fed data, knowledge, and information, and they carry out and return results of processing that is pre-programmed. In this case, humans are doing most of the directing.

Cognitive technology is different; it accelerates, enhances and scales human expertise to solve more complex problems by understanding language and interacting more naturally with humans. It can reason to find patterns and form hypotheses, making considered arguments and scenarios planning. And this is exactly what Watson is about.

Watson is a cognitive technology that can think like a human and is available as SaaS products and a set of open APIs (Applications Programming Interface) such as natural language classifier, speech to text, text to speech, visual recognition, etc.

What Does Watson Mean For Procurement?

This disruptive technology, by creating a new digital ecosystem, is pushing Procurement to create a new business model, moving away from objectives centered on cost take out and taking a new customer centric and revenue growth approach. CPOs must employ the right strategy, structure, skillset and cognitive technology if they want to be in a strong position to demonstrate their relevance and value to the organization.

Procurement organizations and their leaders need to embrace the reality and potential for Artificial Intelligence (AI) and cognitive procurement as readily as they would accept other technologies and developments. AI will bring changes and challenges but it will also bring amazing opportunities for the profession.

As we apply AI to certain procurement tasks and processes, we will begin developing internal capability and expertise.

Applying Cognitive Tech To Procurement

Cognitive technology has already proven to be particularly helpful at helping procurement with a number of specific tasks and programs. These include:

Quickly sorting through very large amounts of structured or unstructured data. This is especially useful for benchmarking and supplier analysis

Providing very detailed supplier assessments of a single supplier, a group of suppliers or the whole supply base

More generically, cognitive computing will undeniably be a key ingredient to innovation, helping to find new ways of operating, providing new insights, uncovering new opportunities and last but not least it will elevate procurement professionals to the well-deserved advisor role by extending their capabilities and growing their experience.

How Can Procurement Prepare For The Changes That Are Coming?

The question that so many procurement organisations are asking is how can they make cognitive tech a reality and where to start?

Adopting and integrating cognitive solutions into an organization is a journey and not a destination.

Firstly, CPOs need to be clear about what matters the most. In order to grow their company’s business and best benefit from the technology, they must set realistic expectations and develop long-term plans with incremental milestones

Secondly, transformation doesn’t happen by itself. It requires the vision and support from the top. As an example, Bob Murphy, IBM’s CPO, is the biggest driver of change in terms of transforming his organization. He saw the potential in cognitive technology and the prospects for Procurement and became an evangelist within the team; encouraging, sponsoring and demanding we embrace this opportunity.

Thirdly, leveraging big data is a key area to take advantage of, especially in data management. This ensures that organisations have the right structure and strategy. At IBM, we have appointed a Procurement Data Officer and also hired data scientists within the procurement team as we understood that procurement needed to take a more active role in extracting and analyzing data to demonstrate its value especially by leveraging the data we are managing and generating. (i.e data in RFP answers, ….)

The Race Is On – Can Procurement Shape Up In Time?

With cognitive technology, procurement teams will be equipped with the tools to navigate the procurement process quickly, easily and more compliantly. This will allow more time for procurement teams to focus on strategic supplier activities after contract signature, such as performance management or supplier collaboration and innovation programs. But is the function ready for this shift?

Embedding such advanced technology requires some serious changes in skills and competencies within our teams. Procurement leaders will have to search for procurement professionals not only focusing on their core competencies, such as category expertise, negotiation skills or market knowledge, but it will be more and more important to hire people with the “right” soft skills. The function must onboard and retain people with excellent relationship management and analytical skills and with a high aptitude to work with advanced technology and financial acumen.

The procurement landscape will have to reshape to a more business leading capability that has to operate in a much more virtual and networked environment where emerging roles of data scientists, business relationship managers and innovation scouts, to mention a few, will be increasingly required.

In short, beyond just being capable of creating visible savings, the role of the procurement organisation will have to shift its focus beyond cost reduction efforts, and move towards a trusted advisor role; accurate, fast and efficient.

There’s no doubt about it, late adopters of the digital transformation or organisations failing to take into consideration the growing exigencies such as speed, value for money, collaboration will be soon perceived as road blockers rather than enablers.

No matter how complex they might be, supply chains are sequential by definition. They stretch from one geographical point to another, each link representing one of many upstream or downstream businesses that make up the whole.

But in a hyper-connected, interdependent world, the concept of the chain no longer does justice to the complexity of a supply manager’s role. Any attempt to map out a modern international supplier network will end up looking more like a cluster diagram, or a series of cogs and gears.

Supply Ecosystems versus Supply Chains

To unpack some of the key differences (and similarities) between ecosystems and chains, let’s examine some key terms.

Interdependency

While a single link in a supply chain is only directly connected with its two immediate neighbours, each part of an ecosystem relies upon every other. This has been referred to as “super-connectivity” or “hyper-cooperation”. This comes with enormous benefits in terms of visibility, data collection and knowledge transfer.

Cooperation

Rather than having a single purchasing organisation sitting at the top of a supply chain, a supply ecosystem may involve a network of competing business with shared challenges. Collectively, they create and nurture a sourcing base that will benefit their individual businesses and the ecosystem as a whole.

Fragility and resilience

When a link in your linear supply chain snaps, the whole structure is at risk of collapse. A supply ecosystem is similarly fragile, as each component has its own important part to play. However, the difference is that the entire extended stakeholder network can work together to rapidly replace any missing part.

Knowledge

While organisations are eager to unlock potential innovation among their suppliers, they are often frustrated by a lack of visibility beyond the first-tier, or the neighbouring link in the chain.

Within the super-connected ecosystem, there is an increased flow of data, and better exchange of skills and knowledge. This means shared challenges are more likely to be solved through crowdsourcing among the entire network’s talent pool.

Again, problems will be tackled and solved with the conviction that what is good for the overall ecosystem will also benefit every member therein.

IBM Watson Gets It

The cognitive procurement technology leverages the entire ecosystem rather than the usual first-tier suppliers. This enables collaboration across every supplier organisation in your network to identify gaps, share capability and mitigate risks before they become obstructions.

The Supply Management Lexicon is Changing

The procurement and supply management profession is changing rapidly, and the language we use is changing with it. In 2016 alone we’ve gone so far as to declare obsolete three frequently used terms in procurement:

Do you agree that these terms have passed their use-by date? What other frequently-used supply management terms are also likely to disappear within the next decade? Leave a comment below!

Procurement exists in an ever-changing environment. Keeping up to date, even with terminology and concepts, can be a struggle. However, technology, like Watson Supply Chain, can help by making information available wherever we are. Find out more here.

“The future always comes too fast.” Those are the words of Alvin Toffler, the best-selling author and futurist known for his works examining the impact of technologies.

It seems paradoxical that the technologies that help us stay competitive in today’s global business environment can also disrupt industries.

For example, if your career spans 25 years, you probably have some personal perspective on this disruption. We’ve seen the Internet, enterprise software, and mobile phones emerge and evolve – and now could never imagine doing business without them. They’ve not only transformed our businesses and industries, but our lives and our world.

Some technologies cause ripples, some cause waves. Some businesses and industries benefit from the resulting changes, and others fall behind. A few businesses see changes on the horizon and take action. Yet others get swept up in the tide.

The Next Wave: Cognitive Technology

What’s the next wave? The next game-changing technology on par with the Internet, enterprise software, and mobile devices? Many analysts point to artificial intelligence, also known as cognitive technology.

Cognitive technologies are no longer the realm of science fiction. According to TechRepublic (ZDNet), technology and economics are aligning in a way that puts us at “a tipping point after which the use of artificial intelligence will become commonplace.”

IDC estimates that, by 2020, 50 percent of all business software will incorporate some cognitive computing functionality.

Also, the Pew Research Center noted, “By 2025, artificial intelligence will be built into the algorithmic architecture of countless functions of business and communication, increasing relevance, reducing noise, increasing efficiency and reducing risk across everything from finding information to making transactions.”

The Thinking Technology

Cognitive technologies actually understand, learn, and think through any objective, problem, or question you present, and then offer detailed answers, analysis, or solutions. They reason and learn like a human, but at enormous scale and speed, providing deeper insights and intelligence.

Cognitive technology presents a tremendous opportunity to business and procurement. For example, with cognitive technologies, procurement organisations can provide very detailed supplier assessments in just minutes, drawing from a wide range of data sources.

Additionally, they can provide much more in-depth risk assessments and uncover previously hidden sources of disruption and risk. And procurement can become more adept at innovating, providing the business new insights and opportunities.

Opportunity or Disruption

The opportunity for cognitive technology is tremendous, but organisations need to look ahead and prepare. Procurement leaders should start thinking how cognitive technology will transform roles and organisations. They must re-skill their team with talents that enable this shift.

Perhaps the best ways to do so are to start cognitive projects in certain key areas. Think about what projects or processes in your organisation could most benefit from cognitive technology.

As you apply these technologies to certain tasks and processes, you’ll begin developing internal capability and expertise. And you’ll begin to enhance the skill set of your professionals.

Another way to prepare for the cognitive future is to develop and hone data analytics skills and projects. Even in the absence of perfect systems or perfect data, analytics programs can provide tremendous value.

Levels of procurement and analytics maturity can vary and evolve over time. However, analytics can immediately play a key role in enabling procurement transformation and success, across a number of areas, including:

Savings and value creation;

Risk mitigation; or

Supplier development and innovation.

Research shows that the most successful procurement organisations take a more comprehensive approach to analytics technologies. And such programs build the foundation for application and success of cognitive technologies.

The future is always just around the corner. But some waves of technology innovation are bigger than others. Cognitive, by all accounts, is one of those big waves.

For those who fail to prepare, it guarantees disruption. For those who take the reins, it presents tremendous opportunity.

What if you could see the supply chain road ahead and mitigate risks before they become obstructions? For procurement, this helping hand can come from IBM Watson Supply Chain. Find out all you need to know here.